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The Assault on Humanism 



Atlantic Monographs 

The Assault on 
Humanism 

By Paul Shorey 




Atlantic Monthly Company 
Boston 



- ■ 



LQ /oil 



Copyright, 1017 
By ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 



JUN 27 1917 
© CI. A 4 6 7 6 4 6 



PREFACE 

In the common lot of physical mortality, 
Nature has discriminated against the maga- 
zine. Less ephemeral in essential things than 
the newspaper, it follows the daily journal 
close in the race for oblivion. Like other liv- 
ing creatures, however, the magazine adapts 
itself instinctively to the circumstances of its 
being, and lives its time, taking on [the vivid 
colors of the world about it, careless how soon 
they fade after the last fatal days of the month 
have heralded the birth of a successor. But 
it is The Atlantic's happy experience to enjoy, 
now and again, a kind of posthumous satis- 
faction in a continuing public interest in 
contributions which, thanks to the spirit of 
the times, or to the genius of an author, are 
read, reread, and saved with painful care. 
To these occasional and unusual contribu- 
tions, The Atlantic has determined to offer a 
less precarious immortality by publishing 
them now and again in editions of its own, 
selecting a form we consider appropriate, 
[5] 



Preface 

and a price our friends may not frown upon. 
No fitter beginning of this proposed series 
could be made than with the republication of 
these sharp and glittering essays of Professor 
Shorey's, written in defense of things he holds 
most precious. If not another blow be struck 
for the classics in our lifetime, historians will 
yet maintain that a good fight has been fought, 
and one well worthy of the luminous chronicles 
which adorn the pages of humanism. 

E. S. 
Atlantic Monthly Office, 
June 1917. 



[6] 



The Assault on Humanism 
I 

Not to us first have the things of beauty 
seemed fair, the sore-tried humanist mur- 
murs after Theocritus. But Tennyson's 
adaptation is more pertinent to the 
present purpose: — 

Not only we, the latest seed of time, 
New men that in the flying of a wheel 
Cry down the past, — 

not only we blaspheme the divinity that 
we lack eyes to discern. 

Es wird nichts so schon gemacht 
Es kommt einer der's veracht! 

There were brave men living before 
Agamemnon, and educational reformers 
who had the courage of their insensibili- 
ties before Mr. Flexner. He stands in 
the momentary limelight, the transient 
American embodiment of a recurrent 
type, exhibiting as the first pledges of a 
[71 



The Assault on Humanism 

new science of education the iconoclasms 
of Tom Paine's Age of Reason, and the 
arguments against Latin of the chapter 
on Education in the fourth Discourse of 
Helvetius's De VEsprit. 

Education — what it is, in contrast to 
what it might be — has always seemed to 
impatient revolutionaries a no less unsat- 
isfactory and bungling makeshift than 
marriage, government, the distribution 
of property, or life itself. And the em- 
phasis of his irresponsible denunciation 
has often convinced naive disciples that 
the protestant is divinely commissioned 
to administer a new school system for the 
creation of a new heaven and a new earth. 

An excellent subject for a monograph 
of the pedagogical seminar would be a 
comparative historical study of the psy- 
chology of the projectors and enthusiasts, 
the expositors of Great Didactics, and 
exploiters of Gertrudes teaching their 
children, and institutors of Senhusian 
schools who have proclaimed this gospel 

[8] 



The Assault on Humanism 

of educational ' reformation without tarry- 
ing for any.' 

A specialist in the psychology of adver- 
tising would be needed to appreciate the 
unconscious policy that attracts atten- 
tion by paradoxes and exaggerations 
which are compromised and attenuated 
in practice when the object has been 
attained. The philosopher of history 
would then remind the disdainful human- 
ist that these crudities are inseparable 
from the wasteful process of human evolu- 
tion, and that the final outcome of agita- 
tion is sometimes a good unforeseen by 
the agitator. And the conclusion of the 
whole matter would be that sage return of 
Plato upon himself: 'Ah, dear Glaucon, do 
not affirm that the curriculum which we 
have prescribed for our guardians is the 
best possible education. But only that 
they must have the best, whatever it is, if 
they are to have the chief thing needful.' 

To return to Mr. Flexner — the bookish 
student of recent modernist manifestoes 
[91 



The Assault on Humanism 

experiences that odd sense of 'been there 
before' so entertainingly discussed by the 
Autocrat and attributed by the new psy- 
chology to some weakness or defect of 
'stoic tension' in the brain. 'If this lad 
comes to my school,' says the Platonic 
sophist in effect, 'I will not afflict the spirit 
of youth in him and corrupt his intelli- 
gence with useless studies as other edu- 
cators do, but teach him the art of life 
and how to rule his house and the city.' 
— 'For this reason,' said the Arbiter of 
Elegancies, Petronius, 'do our boys be- 
come so stupid in the schools, because 
they learn nothing that pertains to real 
life.' — 'There's Aristotle,' cries Sir John 
Daw in The Silent Woman, 'a mere com- 
monplace fellow ; Plato a discourser ; Thu- 
cydides and Livy tedious and dry.' — 
'What do you think of the poets, Sir 
John?' inquires Clerimont. — 'Not worthy 
to be named for authors. Homer, an old 
tedious prolix ass, talks of curriers and 
chines of beef ; Virgil, of dunging of land 

[10] 



The Assault on Humanism 

and bees; Horace, of I know not what.' — 
'I think so,' is Clerimont's comment. 

Campanella's City of the Sun antici- 
pates, so far as the undeveloped science 
of his day allowed, moving-picture edu- 
cation and the California millionaire who 
proposes to teach real geography on a 
playground-landscape garden map of the 
world on M creator's Projection, costing 
what only a millionaire could afford. All 
studies and sciences are painted on the 
circuit walls of Campanella's Utopia in an 
admirable manner. The boys move, not 
the pictures. 'Before the third year the 
boys learn the language and the alphabet 
on the wall by walking around them. . . . 
There are magistrates who announce the 
meaning of the pictures, and boys are 
accustomed to learn all the sciences with- 
out toil and as if for pleasure . . . until 
they are ten years old.' 

It would please President Eliot to 
hear that Tn order to find out the bent of 
the genius of each one, after the seventh 
["1 



The Assault on Humanism 

year they take them to the readings of all 
the sciences. There are four lectures 
. . . and in the course of four hours the 
four in their order explain everything.' 

The result, as was to be expected, is 
that 'The sciences are taught with a 
facility ... by which more scholars are 
turned out by us in one year than by you 
in ten or fifteen years.' This is because 
'Not too much care is given to the culti- 
vation of languages ... for such knowl- 
edge requires much servile labor and 
memory work, so that a man is rendered 
unskillful since he has contemplated 
nothing but the words of books.' 

In the classic age of Louis XIV the 
salon philosopher, Antoine de Lamotte, 
undertook to shake off the yoke of opinion 
and authority and 'evaluate' anew all 
traditional literature and time-honored 
studies. He achieved a success of scandal 
by rewriting Homer as Homer ought to 
have written. He also sustained the 
theses that dead languages cannot form 
[12] 



The Assault on Humanism 

the living mind, that modern literature is 
superior to the literature of Greece and 
Rome, and that translations are 'equally 
as good' as the originals. 

Some hundred years later Rousseau 
thinks that the world will be surprised to 
learn that 'I count the study of languages 
among the inutilities of education'; and 
Turgot denounces the pedantry and the 
tyranny of the schoolroom in terms 
strangely familiar to recent readers of the 
Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. 
'They begin by . . . stuffing into the heads 
of children a crowd of the most abstract 
ideas. Those whom nature in her variety 
summons to her by all her objects, we 
fasten up in single spots, we occupy them 
on words which cannot convey any sense 
to them.' 

This is not Mr. Flexner complaining 
that the 'preparatory school . . . uses 
words . . . not primarily to transmit a 
meaning'; or that 'children with a turn 
for the woods' are chained in the dungeons 
[13] 



The Assault on Humanism 

of discipline; it is not Professor O'Shea 
establishing the foundations of 'dynamic 
education' on the scientific principle that 
'the mind grows but slowly and imper- 
fectly' in 'a seat fastened to the floor' ; it is 
not the Pindaric audacity of Mr. Wells's 
lament that his school offered no key to 
the vortex of gigantic forces about him 
in London ; it is not Mr. Randolph Bourne 
explaining how the Wirt plan aims at 
nothing less distractingly comprehensive 
than that 'the child should have every 
day, in some form or other, contact with 
all the different activities which influence 
a well-rounded human being'; it is not 
Miss Rebecca West denouncing the failure 
of middle-aged maiden-lady tutors to 
kindle the fire that in her heart resides, 
and hissing with Blanche Amory, 'il me 
faut des Smotions.' It is a philosopher of 
that eighteenth century to which we owe 
that reactionary document, the Constitu- 
tion of the United States. 

Nor is there anything new to be said 
[14! 



The Assault on Humanism 

in serious or satirical comment on these 
pronouncements. 'Pertinax res barbaries 
est jateoYy says old Simon Grynaeus in 
the preface to the Lyons Plato of 1548. 
Pope's distich is still a sufficient reply 
to the unreal conventional cliche that 
the study of good literature in the class- 
room only engenders a lifelong distaste 
for it: — 

Or damn all Shakespeare like the affected fool 
At court, who hates whate'er he read at school. 

The unprejudiced invalidation of time- 
honored subjects of study was under- 
taken two centuries in advance of the 
modernist school by the tutor and family 
council of Voltaire's Marquis. It was 
decided, to begin with, that the young 
Marquis should not waste his time in 
becoming acquainted with Cicero, Horace, 
and Virgil. 'I wish my son to be a wit,' 
said his mother, 'that he may make a 
figure in the world.' And if he learns 
Latin he is inevitably lost. Are comedies 
or operas played in Latin? But what 
[15} 



The Assault on Humanism 

was he to learn? 'The minds of children 
are overwhelmed with a mass of useless 
knowledge. ... At length, after review- 
ing the merits and demerits of every 
science, it was decided that the young 
Marquis should learn to dance.' There 
is as much soul in the singing and drill at 
Hampton as in the Latin grammar of the 
preparatory school. 

These anticipations of Mr. Flexner's 
ideas are no disproof of their validity. I 
merely wish to contemplate his magnified 
contemporaneity, if not sub specie ceterni- 
tatis, where all finite notabilities dwindle, 
at least in that larger historical perspect- 
ive which he disdains but which brings 
me consolation. 

If argument were identical with what 
a former editor of the Atlantic called the 
'readable proposition,' my task would be 
much simplified. I should without fur- 
ther preface or apology assail in mood and 
figure the logic of Mr. Flexner and Presi- 
dent Eliot, and enter a demurrer which 

[16] 



The Assault on Humanism 

would dispense me from all substantive 
pleading. 

I do not refer primarily to those lament- 
able irrelevancies with which President 
Eliot expands the little that he has to say 
on the main theme. The horrible obses- 
sion of the world-war is the King Charles's 
Head of nearly all contemporaneous dis- 
quisition. To President Eliot the lesson 
of the war is the confirmation of Herbert 
Spencer's philosophy of education: it 
shows that 'science is the knowledge best 
worth having' — for the manufacture of 
high explosives and the construction of 
Zeppelins and submarines? No. 'To 
make possible the secure civilization based 
on justice, the sanctity of contracts [italics 
mine] and good- will.' This may pair off 
with Mr. Cosmo Hamilton's prophecy in 
Harper's Weekly, that after the war the 
European nations will abolish Greek and 
Latin, 'and appoint a big kindly man as 
professor of morals to go in and out among 
the boys.' 

2 [17] 



The Assault on Humanism 

Similarly it would appear that there 
is no effective body of educated opinion 
that makes a man of Mr. Flexner's 
prominence shrink from arguing that the 
very conception of mental discipline is 
annulled by the existence of clever boys 
who find 'hard' studies comparatively 
easy; or that the acceptance by some 
colleges of preparatory Latin as an indis- 
pensable minimum is a virtual admission 
that Latin is not needed at all for a college 
education. 

But these irrelevant obiter dicta are not 
of serious import to the main argument; 
and my demurrer to the logic relates 
rather to methods which Mr. Flexner and 
President Eliot have in common with 
each other and with many assailants of 
classical studies — the shifting of the issue 
from one kind or grade of education to 
another; the fallacy of assigning one 
cause for infinitely complex phenomena; 
the postulate of an 'absolute either — or' 
where no such alternative confronts us; 

[18] 



The Assault on Humanism 

the statement of the opponent's case in its 
feeblest form; exploiting the equivoca- 
tion of 'utility,' 'practical,' 'discipline,' 
'science,' 'culture,' and other ambiguous 
terms; the substitution of prophecy, or 
unsubstantiated assertion, for fact. 

These procedures may pass muster in 
the smooth course of 'the readable propo- 
sition'; they could not endure the test of 
an old-fashioned disputation. 

That liberal, progressive, scientific 
thinker and cautious speaker, John Stuart 
Mill, says, with discriminating precision, 
that 'The greater classics are compositions 
which from the altered conditions of 
human life are likely to be seldom paral- 
leled in their sustained excellence by the 
times to come.' The intrinsic worth of 
classic literature is not the theme of this 
paper, and I shall not attempt to con- 
firm Mill's dictum by elaborate argument. 
But if it happened to be true, it would be 
a fact for a rational philosophy of educa- 
tion to take into the account. 
[19] 



The Assault on Humanism 

Our need for the study of Latin cannot 
be deduced from the eternal order of 
nature, like physics and chemistry. It 
is not even coextensive with our globe, 
like geology. I should not advise a 
Chinese or Japanese boy to study Latin. 
He needs all his linguistic memory for 
other purposes. Some trenchant rhetoric 
of Macaulay often misquoted in this 
debate was designed only to enforce the 
contention that for the education of young 
Hindoos, English is on the whole the most 
available alien language and literature. 

It is quite true that with the length- 
ening of the interval that divides us from 
the renaissance and from Rome, the 
relative significance of Latin for us tends 
to diminish. The time may come when 
Latin will concern us as little as it does 
the Chinese, not to speak of the Martians. 
I do not think it is coming in the next 
fifty years. About 1770, advanced 
thinkers exulted in the belief that their 
arguments had banished the classical 
[20] 



The Assault on Humanism 

superstition forever. In fact, they were 
on the eve of a great revival of Hellenism. 
It would have amazed Kant to be told 
that within fifty years — that is, in 1820 — 
Greek would be a leading study in all the 
Gymnasia of Germany. As my old 
teacher James Russell Lowell used to say, 
I have seen too many spirits of the age to 
be afraid of this one. 

Meanwhile, the broad reasons why 
your boy should certainly study Latin 
if he is going to college, and probably if 
he is going to complete a high-school 
course, are not difficult to discover. It 
is because he inherits largely by way of 
France and England the institutional 
and literary tradition of Greco- Roman 
civilization, and because he speaks a 
language whose higher vocabulary is 
almost wholly Latin and which was 
broken in and fashioned to literary uses 
and the expression of abstract ideas by 
men who not only read but wrote Latin. 
'You no sooner begin to philosophize 
[21] 



The Assault on Humanism 

things,' says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 
'than you must go to the Mediterranean 
languages.' 

This, with some qualifications and 
reserves, is in a lesser degree true also 
of German. French is, as a majority of 
the leading French critics have argued 
in this controversy, essentially a form 
of Latin. But there is a peculiar neces- 
sity that an educated English speaker 
should know at least enough Latin to 
give him some conception of its relation 
to English. Our philosophical German 
friends and critics tell us that English 
lacks the beautiful organic unity and 
purity of German, and that the general 
inferiority of our intelligence is in part 
due to the fact that the vocabulary for 
the expression of ideas is not with us, as in 
German, a natural upgrowth from the 
roots of sensation and perception, but is 
grafted onto the language from an alien 
stock. The structure and the psychol- 
ogy of compound and abstract words is 
[22] 



The Assault on Humanism 

not transparent and intelligible as it is in 
German. Undurchdringlichkeit — to take 
the classic illustration — is a far more full- 
bodied abstracter of the quintessence of 
No Thoroughfare or Durchgang Verboten, 
than 'impenetrability,' 'impermeableness/ 
or 'imperviability' ever could become. 
And Riccksichtlosigkeit, as Mr. Houston 
Stewart Chamberlain would copiously ex- 
pound, possesses a flavor and a tang which 
'inconsiderateness,' or 'regardlessness,' or 
'unscrupulousness' cannot reproduce. 

And hence we imperfect English 
speakers only half understand what we 
are talking about. There is a horribly 
ingenious plausibility in this, as in so 
much philosophical German ratiocination. 
But there is an element of truth which 
we may take to heart. Our literary 
critics have very properly replied that 
English is in some sort a not inharmonious 
juxtaposition or fusion of two languages. 
It is, in respect of its substantive vocabu- 
lary, a far more complicated instrument 
[23] 



The Assault on Humanism 

and organ of thought than either German 
or French. And for this very reason it 
yields to those who know all its stops 
effects with which even Greek can hardly 
vie. Well, most of us are not directly 
concerned with the final mastery of 
English for these highest artistic and 
philosophical ends. But the education 
of our guiding classes must recognize that, 
without some clue to this double structure, 
the normal English speaker will certainly 
have less intelligence, and probably less 
practical mastery of his native idiom, 
than the Frenchman or the German. He 
will be more exposed to the mental con- 
fusion of dimly discerned meanings and 
imperfectly apprehended relations. The 
moral is plain. 

In defiance of Mr. Flexner's unwar- 
ranted admonition that we must rest 
our case on one argument only, we may 
supplement this fundamental and ele- 
mentary consideration by others hardly 
less so. Some training in the compara- 
[24] 



The Assault on Humanism 

tive grammar of a synthetic and an 
analytic language, is an almost indis- 
pensable form of mental discipline for the 
speakers of such a language as ours. 
And Latin, for a priori reasons approved 
by esteemed psychologists, by virtue of 
its historic relationships, and also on the 
evidence of a wide experience, is the best 
available language for the purpose. 
What the new pedagogy calls 'content 
value' is added by the further considera- 
tion that the chief Latin classics — Cicero, 
Virgil, Livy, Horace — in their lucid ra- 
tionality and precision, their urbanity, 
their sanity, their common sense, their 
humanized and humanizing emancipation 
from 'primitive foolishness,' parochialism 
and fanaticism, are singularly well 
adapted for the initiation of the youthful 
mind into literature, criticism of life, and 
the historic sense; and that they have in 
fact been so used to such an extent that 
the literature of Europe prior to the year 
1900 is unintelligible without them. 'And 
[25] 



The Assault on Humanism 

if in Arkansaw or Texas I should meet a 
man reading Horace, I were no stranger,' 
notes Emerson in the ninth volume of his 
Journal. 

Lastly, without some preparation in 
Latin the youth who goes on to college 
cannot study critically linguistics, phil- 
osophy, history, or any Romance lan- 
guage, or any European literature, or 
anything, in short, except physical science, 
in which he probably does not wish to 
specialize, and 'Science mousseuse' which, 
without critical equipment, will only 
addle his brains. 'I was thinking,' said 
Brother Copas to the wild little American, 
'That I might start teaching you Latin — 
it's the only way to find out all that St. 
Hospital means, including all that it has 
meant for hundreds of years.' 



[26] 



II 

I expect to develop these obvious but 
indispensable topics in a separate paper. 
There is no reason why I should inter- 
rupt the present argument with this 
detail. The work has been done. This 
is not a new question to be debated in 
vacuo. 

Indeed, my chief complaint against 
the assailants of Latin is their inac- 
quaintance with, or their deliberate sup- 
pression of, the considerable literature in 
which these suggestions are worked out 
with discriminating specific arguments 
and concrete illustrations. Some years 
ago I debated a similar question with 
President Eliot at the meeting of the 
Association of American Universities. 
He paid no attention to my paper at the 
time, and he now writes in the Atlantic in 
total disregard of the entire literature of 
the subject. I do not mean merely that 
he suppresses the bibliography and the 
[27] 



The Assault on Humanism 

mention of names : I mean that he neglects 
distinctions that have been pertinently 
drawn, ignores challenges that have been 
presented again and again, and reiterates 
without qualification fallacies that have 
repeatedly been exploded. In this Presi- 
dent Eliot conforms to the general prac- 
tice or policy of opponents of Latin and 
writers on pedagogy. They either have 
not read the literature which they contro- 
vert, or they intentionally ignore it. 
They do not inform their readers of its 
existence, and they do not even tacitly 
amend their own arguments to meet its 
specific contentions. In controversy this 
is what Lincoln called 'bushwhacking.' 
In the authors of textbooks of the science 
or the history of education it is the aban- 
donment of the scientific for the frankly 
partisan attitude. 

The third volume of Professor Graves's 
History of Education emphasizes through- 
out Herbert Spencer's well-known essay 
and quotes considerable passages from it 
[28] 



The Assault on Humanism 

and from Huxley. It does not mention 
any of the replies to these arguments. 
There is no reference to John Stuart 
Mill's inaugural address, to Matthew 
Arnold's lectures in America, to Jebb, 
Gildersleeve, and the long line of writers 
who have riddled the arguments of 
Spencer, and have pointed out the very 
special conditions that determined Hux- 
ley's attitude and that limit the applica- 
tion of his satire. There is no hint of the 
fact that among the advocates of classical 
studies have been nearly all the great 
critics of the nineteenth century, from 
Goethe, Coleridge and Sainte-Beuve to 
Brunetiere, Anatole France, Lemaitre, 
Faguet, Doumic, Lowell, and Arnold. 
And that these writers have given definite 
reasons for their faith. 

Professor Graves's book is only a typical 
and rather moderate example of the pre- 
vailing practice of modernists and pro- 
fessors of pedagogy — in their books, as I 
know; in their classrooms, as I am 
[29] 



The Assault on Humanism 

informed. They not only argue as parti- 
sans against the Classics but they sys- 
tematically suppress both the arguments 
and the bibliography of the case for the 
Classics. Mr. Flexner, for example, takes 
for granted, as needing no qualification 
by distinctions, that catchword of the new 
pedagogy in every age — the crude abso- 
lute antithesis between the study of words 
and the study of things. 'Things,' says 
Plato in an abbreviated but fair summary, 
'fall into two classes. Some things have 
sensible likenesses easy to apprehend. 
These you can point out and so teach 
them readily without trouble and the use 
of language. But the greatest and most 
precious things have no outward image of 
themselves visible to man, to which the 
teacher can lightly point and so satisfy 
the soul of the inquirer. Therefore we 
must train and discipline our minds to 
render and receive an account of them in 
words. For it can be done in no other 
way.' 

[30I 



The Assault on Humanism 

Plato is a primitive thinker suspect 
of mystical realism, and that authority 
will not impress Mr. Flexner. Let him 
then weigh and answer what (to select a 
few names at random) Coleridge, Ruskin, 
Mill, Lloyd-Morgan, Croce, and Sir 
Arthur Quiller-Couch have said about 
this precious opposition between words 
and things. We shall then cheerfully 
continue the discussion. Till then we 
are absolved. 

Similarly, Mr. Flexner dismisses the 
service of Latin studies to English style 
with the cavalier averment, 'No evidence 
has ever been offered.' But quite apart 
from the many detailed and discriminating 
discussions of the question in the litera- 
ture of Apology for the Classics, there is 
the consentient present-day testimony of 
many of the leading professors of English 
and modern languages, as provisionally 
presented with particularizing argument 
and illustration in the pamphlets of Pro- 
fessors Gayley, Sherman, Grandgent, 
[31] 



The Assault on Humanism 

Lane Cooper, and in the lectures on the 
art of writing by the King Edward VII 
Professor of English Literature at Cam- 
bridge. We do not ask Mr. Flexner to 
submit his judgment to these authorities, 
or to their reasons, if he can answer them. 
It is the method of debate that ignores 
them (the arguments not the names) to 
which we demur. The subject is still 
open for any fresh considerations which 
Mr. Flexner has to present. But his 
dictum that no evidence has been ever 
offered is not argument, but a petulant 
ebullition of feeling. 

It follows that, in the present state of 
the question, the principal effort of the 
classicist who aims at argument rather 
than eloquence must be to shame his 
opponents from their unfair tactics, their 
neglect of the evidence, their preposterous 
logic, and to urge the educated public to 
examine the matter for themselves. He 
must wearily repeat his old list of 'must 
nots' and 'don'ts.' You must not shift 
[32I 



The Assault on Humanism 

the issue by talking about democracy and 
the masses, and industrial education, and 
Booker Washington at Tuskegee, and 
Madame Montessori. That is a mere 
subterfuge. We are speaking of non- 
vocational high-school and collegiate edu- 
cation. You must not urge that 'they 
don't get Latin,' that Latin is badly 
taught and imperfectly remembered, un- 
less you can show that other subjects 
are always effectively taught and not 
forgotten. And also, unless you confess 
that the unrest and the unsettlement 
which you yourselves have introduced 
into American education is a chief cause 
of the lack of conviction with which most 
definite or difficult subjects are taught 
and studied to-day. 

You must not talk as most of you do 
about eight, ten, or twelve years of Latin 
study without result, for that is an un- 
scrupulous exaggeration. You must not 
misquote and apply to totally different 
conditions the satire of English writers 

3 [33] 



The Assault on Humanism 

aimed at schools in which practically 
nothing was taught except the writing of 
Latin verse. 

You must not argue that, because 
Latin is comparatively less important to 
us than it was to the Renaissance, it is 
therefore of little or no significance. For, 
if you have ever studied elementary logic, 
you know the name for that kind of reason- 
ing. You must not regard a demagogic 
sneer at culture as an argument, for cul- 
ture is a harmless necessary word that 
serves as well as another to designate if 
not to describe a persistent though not 
easily definable ideal — the thing, let us 
say, that a Latinless generation of grad- 
uates will presumably lack. 

You must not say, as President Eliot 
again repeats, that modern literature is not 
inferior to the Classics. That is a con- 
solation for those who cannot have both. 
But our contention is precisely that the 
boy who goes to college or even through 
the high school will understand modern 
[34] 



The Assault on Humanism 

literature better for knowing even a little 
Latin. There is no real incompatibility 
between knowing Latin and acquaintance 
with modern literature. The professors 
of Classics would cheerfully stand a 
competitive examination on modern liter- 
ature with the professional modernists 
at any time. 

You must not argue that Latin is 
useless, without discriminating the vari- 
ous meanings of utility, the higher and 
lower utility, the immediate and remote 
utility, direct and indirect — and unless 
you are prepared also to abolish for high 
school and college students all studies 
that are useless in the precise sense in 
which the term applies to Latin. You 
must not tell the public that the science 
of psychology has disproved mental dis- 
cipline in general, or the specific value of 
the discipline of analytic language study in 
particular. For if you are a competent 
psychologist you know that it is false. 
And to sum up and conclude these nega- 
[351 



The Assault on Humanism 

tive commandments, you ought not to 
divert the minds of your pupils, your 
readers, your audiences, from the real 
issue, by rhetorical appeals either to 
prejudice or to pseudo-science. 

By the appeal to prejudice I mean such 
things as the perpetual insinuation that 
classical studies are aristocratic, undemo- 
cratic, supercilious, arrogant, narrowly 
exclusive, and unappreciative of modern 
excellence. Democracy has nothing to 
do with the matter; and it is a shameless 
fallacy to introduce the word into the 
discussion at all. There is no connection 
between the equality of men before the 
law and the attempt to equalize the 
educational value of all subjects for all 
purposes. Any kind of knowledge may 
puff up some kinds of men, and to triumph 
over your neighbor because he happens 
not to know the things you know best, is 
not an amiable trait of human nature. 
The perpetual defensive against unfair 
attack may lend a touch of acerbity to 
[36] 



The Assault on Humanism 

the speech of some advocates of the 
Classics. But classical teachers of today, 
as a whole, are, as they have to be, a 
rather meek and meeching set. 

The successful practical man hires his 
chemists and physicists as he may hire a 
classical tutor for his son or for his uni- 
versity; and he is not in the least preju- 
diced against the study of chemistry and 
physics by the suspicion that the associate 
professor of chemistry, who has a salary 
of twenty-five hundred dollars a year, 
secretly regards him as an ignoramus. 



[371 



Ill 

Some humanistic readers may be dis- 
appointed by the space given to these 
dialectics of controversy. But it is no 
longer worth while to play this game 
according to the conventional rules. 
What is expected in a plea for classical 
studies is gentle deprecation of the utili- 
tarian and commercial spirit of the age, 
and wistful emotional appeals to an 
idealism that soars beyond all practical 
reference to actual educational conditions 
and all narrow scrutiny of the adversary's 
logic. There is thus no meeting of minds. 
The rhetoric of idealism makes no impres- 
sion on advocates who have prejudged the 
case which they refuse to study. And 
the general reader, even if pleasantly and 
irresponsibly titillated for the moment, 
turns away in the mood of Tennyson's 
Northern Farmer after the sermon, — 

'An' I thowt a said whot a owt to a said, an I coom'd 
awaay.' 

[38] 



The Assault on Humanism 

I do not know whether Mr. Leacock 
intended seriously his skit on 'Homer 
and Humbug,' and the stone which he 
wished to hurl into the academic garden 
wrapped in the rune, 'Homer and the 
Classics are just primitive literature.' 
But to the Spencers and the Le Bons who 
take it seriously, we could only reply, — 

Deafer . . . blinder unto holy things, 
Hope not to make thyself by idle vows, 
Being too blind to have desire to see. 

If we are to count opinions, Professor 
Leacock's opinion that the art of Homer 
belongs 'in the same class as primitive 
music and . . . primitive medicine' will 
count as one. And so will the opinion of 
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch that 'Homer 
stands first, if not unmatched, among 
poets in the technical triumph over the 
capital disability of annihilating flat pas- 
sages.' And Professor Leacock's emotion 
of conviction is more than matched by 
that of this successful writer of twentieth- 
century novels and Professor of English 
[39] 



The Assault on Humanism 

Literature at Cambridge, who declares 
that if the university should limit him to 
three texts on which to preach English 
Literature, he would choose the Bible, 
Shakespeare, and Homer — and Homer 
first. There is ample choice in opinions. 

The fact that, after twenty years or so 
of high-school teaching, a gentleman who 
has presented no public evidence of 
specialized and scientific competency be- 
yond administrative ability and the mas- 
tery of a ready journalistic pen, experi- 
ences a distaste for Milton and Burke and 
opines that Latin and algebra are not 
significant studies, is in itself of no more 
significance than the fact that an elderly 
teacher of Greek is of the contrary opin- 
ion. What makes it a timely topic of 
discussion is the consideration that the 
reformer is widely believed to speak as an 
expert or for experts in a supposed science 
of education. 

'Abraham Flexner is another new name 
that appeals to us,' writes the San Fran- 
[40] 



The Assault on Humanism 

cisco Chronicle of August 19, 1916. 'He 
. . . says "mental discipline is not a 
genuine or valid purpose — it's a make- 
believe. " ' Our plain speech is a part of 
the price that Mr. Flexner must pay for 
this continental fame. 

There can be no question of personality 
so long as the appeal is solely to the unmis- 
represented printed word. And no skepti- 
cism that we may express about the 
validity of his science can offend his sense 
of propriety more than the language of his 
disciples about the Classics of England, 
Greece, and Rome shocks those to whom 
the Classics are a personal religion. 

One of the tests for vocational fitness 
approved by the experts to whose sci- 
entific evaluations we are asked to submit 
the destiny of humanistic studies is to 
cross out a given word or letter in an 
assigned text. Testing myself by this 
method on the text of Mr. Flexner's 
article, I drew my pencil through eighty- 
one occurrences of 'discipline' and 'dis- 
[41] 



The Assault on Humanism 

ciplinary.' Doubtless, if my perceptions 
had not been blunted by thirty years' 
teaching of Greek and Latin, I might 
have observed more. But even from 
these inadequate statistics my unscientific 
mind inferred an obsession. And, in 
truth, through twenty columns of the 
Atlantic Mr. Flexner tilts at windmills of 
his own hallucination and belabors men 
of straw. Whatever some foolish advo- 
cates of the Classics may have sometimes 
said, the systematic exaggeration of the 
value of merely disciplinary or gymnastic 
study is no essential element in our unwill- 
ingness to have American education reg- 
ulated out of hand by experts who hate 
Lycidas and think Comus a bore. 

The systematic antithesis between a 
supposed disciplinary theory of education 
and a content system is fallacious in logic 
and has no basis in fact. There is no 
such sharply antithetic absolute 'entweder- 
oder' as the argument postulates. The 
alleged incompatibility between the cul- 
[42] 



The Assault on Humanism 

ture argument and the disciplinary theory 
rests upon the unwarranted assumption 
that each is to be taken exclusively. 
But it is apparent to common sense that 
the reasons for the place in the curriculum 
assigned to any given study may be and 
usually are cumulative — the sum of our 
estimates of its disciplinary, cultural, 
utilitarian, vocational, aesthetic, social, or 
other values. The matter cannot be 
disposed of by this high a priori road. It 
is not true that the schools of to-day are 
dominated by the ideal of formal discipline. 
It is not true, unless the modernists belong 
to the class from which Emerson prayed 
to be delivered — of those who think 
themselves persecuted when they are 
contradicted. It is not true, unless Mr. 
Flexner, like a recent anonymous satirist 
of faculty meetings, regards any survival 
of an idea that he desires to extirpate as 
equivalent to its superstitious worship. 

As an expert in secondary education, 
Mr. Flexner must be aware that the actual 
[43] 



The Assault on Humanism 

curricula of the schools and the statistics 
of election are grossly at variance with 
his exaggerations. It is perhaps an un- 
easy suspicion of this that constrains him 
to buttress his main thesis with two sub- 
sidiary arguments. The infection of the 
hateful disciplines, Latin and algebra, 
communicates itself to all other studies 
and causes them to be taught in a dull, 
mechanical, lifeless, formal fashion. The 
sole support of this generalization is that 
comprehensive indictment of human falli- 
bility and inefficiency which has always 
gained the reformer his hearing. Inde- 
pendently of all preconceived purposes 
and systems, languid, mechanical, and 
in that sense 'formal' teaching is easier 
for the teacher than the exhausting out- 
pour of inspiration, life, and originality. 
Half-vitalized teaching will remain with 
us until the modernist Utopia provides 
and pays for a quarter of a million of the 
'original or heroic school-teachers' missed 
by Mr. H. G. Wells — teachers exempt 
[44l 



The Assault on Humanism 

from frailty and love of ease, and intensely 
vital, alert, and intelligent throughout the 
long and weary day. Every new and 
'practical' or 'inspirational' reform has 
lapsed into mechanism, formalism, and 
verbalism in the goose-step-drilled masses 
of its teachers. Even the agricultural 
colleges out West, I am told, find it easier 
and pleasanter to lecture on agricultural 
pedagogy than to teach real farming in 
the sweat of the brow. 

The other indirect argument is that 
the influence of the preparatory school 
technically so-called, and the presence 
of college requirements, impose the dis- 
ciplinary ideal upon all secondary schools. 
There is nothing to confirm this assertion 
except its Zwecknotwendigkeit for the 
purposes of Mr. Flexner's argument. It 
suggests, however, a problem which Mr. 
Flexner does not here discuss and at which 
I can only glance. It is not true that in 
large American high schools the organiza- 
tion of college preparatory classes is 
[45] 



The Assault on Humanism 

prohibitive in cost, or presents difficulties 
of administration that a little good-will 
could not easily overcome. But the 
good-will is often lacking, and principals 
who hate the Classics or are irrationally 
jealous of the colleges avail themselves of 
these pretexts to suppress Greek alto- 
gether, while waiting for the day of 
reckoning with Latin. Some time it will 
be needful to argue this question to a 
conclusion, and to appeal to thoughtful 
secondary teachers to repudiate the dema- 
gogues who do not blush to tell them that 
the very term college requirements is an 
offense, because 'it is the student who has 
requirements, not the college.' 

Equally brief must be my examination 
of Mr. Flexner's main contention that 
psychological and educational science does 
not recognize any such thing as mental 
discipline. The general tendency to the 
spread of power and facility to connected 
functions and processes, and the technical 
testimony of science in respect of this 
[ 4 6] 



The Assault on Humanism 

irradiation of acquired faculty in the more 
elementary processes of the mind, are 
still under debate, with a strong presump- 
tion that there exists such a tendency. 
To the practical purpose of estimating the 
disciplinary value of high-school and 
collegiate studies, this kind of science has 
nothing to contribute. The essential con- 
sideration is obviously the number of 
elements which the compared processes 
have in common — the elements, that is 
to say, which the entire educational 
process involved in the linguistic analyses 
of Latin grammar, the mastery of Latin 
vocabulary, the critical translation and 
appreciation of Latin writers has in 
common with other desirable kinds of 
knowledge or forms of mental activity 
and faculty. 

In other words, science leaves this 
question where it was — to the adjudi- 
cation of common sense, observation, 
and relevant argument on the specific 
facts by those who know the facts well 
[47] 



The Assault on Humanism 

enough to discuss them intelligently. 
This is familiar ground. It is perfectly 
well known to competent psychologists. 
And the abuse of the appeal to 'science' 
in this connection has been discreditable 
to the professors of pedagogy and an 
imposition on the public as well. 

I have said this before, and heard in 
reply that, as an amateur, I had mis- 
understood the statements of the peda- 
gogical psychologists. They were aware 
that science had not pronounced a defini- 
tive verdict. But the question is, not 
what individual controversialists may 
know, but what the majority of them seek 
to make the public believe. Pedagogical 
psychology cannot escape this collective 
responsibility by hedging in this manner. 
Mr. Flexner himself may never have so 
hedged or evaded. I dare say he has 
always charged headlong whenever he 
fancied that he saw the red rag of mental 
discipline. But if he is acquainted with 
the literature of the question, he ought 
[48] 



The Assault on Humanism 

not to tell the public that science recog- 
nizes no such thing. 

The dead set against 'mental discipline' 
is polemics, not science. It is forgotten 
as soon as it has served to discredit Latin 
and algebra. There are authentic anec- 
dotes of the allegation of mental discipline 
in justification of high-school courses in 
typewriting. Professor O'Shea argues, 
that 'hewing to the line in manual training 
will make the student realize the necessity 
of hewing to the moral line in all his con- 
duct,' and that 'the experience thus gained 
with natural things insensibly affects all 
one's relationships.' 

Similarly, Mr. Flexner's digression and 
diatribe on the so-called faculty psychol- 
ogy is merely a red herring across the 
trail. For the purposes of secondary and 
collegiate education it does not matter 
two straws whether the so-called faculties 
of the mind do or do not 'exist in separate 
form.' The reduction of all questions to 
their ultimate metaphysical terms is a 

4 [49] 



The Assault on Humanism 

favorite fallacy of the sciolist. The pro- 
test against the 'faculty psychology' has 
become one of the most intolerable of 
twentieth-century commonplaces. Every 
body suspects everybody else of over- 
looking the ultimate unity and inter- 
dependence of the so-called parts or 
functions of the mind. From Matthew- 
Arnold's sonnet on Butler's sermons back 
to Plato's Republic, a long series of poets 
and metaphysicians illustrates this antin- 
omy. We are no nearer a final meta- 
physical solution than in Plato's day. 
And common sense will continue to dis- 
cuss education in terms of mental faculties 
as the eminent psychologist Lloyd-Mor- 
gan does, without commitment to any 
absolute metaphysical hypothesis about 
the one and the many in mind and their 
relation to matter. 



[50] 



IV 

It is comparatively easy to parry these 
or any other particular thrusts of the 
experts in the new pedagogical science. 
But how shall we meet the vague pre- 
disposition in the twentieth-century mind 
to admit that there is, there must be, 
there is soon destined to be, a true science 
of education taking its principles from a 
scientific and definitive psychology. For 
it is to this popular faith that the chief and 
final fallacy of the militant modernists, the 
insinuation of pseudo-science under cover 
of real science, makes its appeal. 

This indeterminate claim can be met 
only by an equally broad challenge to 
produce the evidence, to exhibit some 
tangible results fairly proportionate to 
the expenditure of money, time, labor, 
and investigation on these subjects in 
the past fifty years. Pseudo-science is 
not an invidious question-begging epi- 
thet. It is merely a convenient watch- 
[51] 



The Assault on Humanism 

word for that policy of carrying the war 
into Africa to which the humanist is 
driven, and in which he is justified by 
the present conduct of the debate. 

The conflict of science and Classics 
is a dead issue. Science has won an 
overwhelming victory. And its real com- 
petitor in education to-day is, not classical 
humanism, but pseudo-science. There is 
ample time for both science and Latin in 
a rationally constructed curriculum. 
There is not time for both and for the 
dementia prcecox of premature preoccupa- 
tion with pseudo-science. 

But real science is hard work — almost 
as hard as Latin; while the science of the 
talking delegates of science is a soft snap. 
And the representatives of real science 
will some time awaken to this fact and 
cease to waste their energies in blockading 
the last starveling remnants of the Greeks, 
and hindering high-school students from 
getting enough linguistic analysis to teach 
them to think and talk straight, and 
[52] 



The Assault on Humanism 

enough Latin vocabulary to render first 
aid to their spelling and qualify them to 
consult an English dictionary with some 
glimmer of intelligence. 

The seemingly invidious term 'pseudo- 
science,' then, is intended only as a fair 
characterization of the monstrous dispro- 
portion between the pretensions of peda- 
gogical psychology, or the science of 
education, and its verifiable achievements. 
It would be ungenerous and illiberal to 
press this point, if the adepts of this 
science frankly admitted that they are 
pioneers on the frontiers of physiology 
and psychology, tentatively working in 
graduate laboratories and seminars 
toward a possible science of the future. 
But they fall back to that bombproof 
only when hard pressed in the open. 
They make very different claims when 
they appear before legislatures, parents' 
meetings, and teachers' associations, or in 
the compilation of the textbooks which 
they compel all teachers to study. 
[53] 



The Assault on Humanism 

An Ohio colleague, Professor Lord, 
writes that 'any graduate of an Ohio 
college who wishes to teach Latin can 
present as a professional qualification for 
such a position courses in the Hegelian 
logic, abnormal psychology, and the birth- 
rate of immigrants. He cannot present as 
part of his professional equipment courses 
in Latin literature or Roman history.' 

The exploiters of such tests as these 
will themselves be tried by tests which 
they cannot endure — not of course in 
this inadequate paper, but in the debates 
of the coming decade. As experts they 
would perhaps deny the competency of 
the amateur critic. But our contention 
is precisely that, in range of classroom 
experience, observation, reflection, and 
pertinent reading, they are no more 
experts than we are. As the Autocrat 
says, the layman has sometimes actually 
heard more sermons than the professional 
preacher and theologian. I can see no 
evidence that they have ever studied or 
[54] 



The Assault on Humanism 

understood, either the literature that 
we wish to teach, or the literature that 
we ourselves produce for purposes of 
'promotion,' in either sense of the word. 
But I for one have read, not a dozen, or a 
score, but many more of their authorities 
and their productions. I read many of 
these treatises with a pencil and a purpose 
to note anything worth noting. I found 
less that was new, true, significant, and 
relevant to the purpose than in any other 
literature of like extent that I ever sam- 
pled. A clever man and ready writer can 
doubtless compile readable jumble-books 
full of unrelated facts and anecdotes, 
drawn from heterogeneous fields of knowl- 
edge, placed in incongruous juxtaposition, 
and unified only by the schematism of 
artificial and arbitrary system. But the 
definite contributions of this literature 
to the understanding of the present 
human mind and to the rational conduct 
of education are in ludicrous disproportion 
to its extent and its pretensions. My 
[55] 



The Assault on Humanism 

present object is not to prove this, but to 
induce a few readers to test it for them- 
selves. It is not so hard as it looks. It 
is a little harder for most people than for 
a teacher of Greek, because he does not 
have to look up the etymologies of the 
mostly superfluous technical terms which 
are the chief stock in trade. 

This literature is like Hesiod's hill of 
virtue — it may be a little rough and 
steep at the beginning, but grows easier 
as we mount; or, rather, facilis descensus 
is the apter classical allusion here. The 
first book you read may seem hard or 
may impose upon you by its variety of 
irrelevant information. But read on, 
and you will find that they all say about 
the same kind of thing and that they 
all say amazingly little — practically 
nothing to edify a reader who is able in 
any reasonable measure to draw upon 
the world's inherited stores of experience 
and common sense. There is plenty of 
truism, paradox, tabulation of statistics, 
[56] 



The Assault on Humanism 

questionnaires, that lead to nothing, and 
descriptions of the technic of experiments 
that prove nothing to the purpose. But 
the challenge to produce definite results 
evokes only assertion and prophecy. 

The programme that postulates the 
application of rigid scientific methods 
to the mind and history of man was not 
first formulated by Spencer, Comte, Vico, 
Spinoza, or Descartes. But recent prog- 
ress in physical science has immensely 
strengthened the plausibility of prophecy 
that the extension and refinement of its 
methods must soon subdue and annex the 
adjacent domains of ' superorganic' evolu- 
tion. 

No one would desire to dash these 
generous aspirations. But living in the 
future is, as Mr. Chesterton says, a soft 
job. And one of the most imperative 
tasks of present-day criticism is to keep 
the highways of common sense and ra- 
tional thought clear of the rubbish shot 
down upon them from pseudo-scientific 
[571 



The Assault on Humanism 

towers of Bable. The naivet6 which 
admits without verification the authentic 
mission of any writer who comes proph- 
esying in the name of science, is natural 
and pardonable in eminent professors of 
physical science, intoxicated by the prog- 
ress which, as they sometimes put it, 
has recently transpired in their own do- 
main. But in the more sophisticated 
representatives of the inchoate sciences, 
the resort to prophecy is a part of the 
recognized tactics of debate. It is with 
this that they meet the challenge to 
exhibit their results, which grows more 
and more embarrassing as the decades 
lengthen out since the foundation of their 
laboratories and the establishment of 
their predominance in education. 

Anybody can verify this provisionally 
by reading the papers in the fifth volume 
of the St. Louis Congress of Arts and 
Sciences, and then going on to the study 
of Professor Titchener's Experimental 
Psychology of the Thought Processes, and a 
[58] 



The Assault on Humanism 

select half-dozen of recent textbooks on 
educational psychology. I am not speak- 
ing of possible contributions to physiology, 
brain-anatomy, pathology, school-admin- 
istration, the elaboration of laboratory 
technic, and the like. These I neither 
affirm nor deny. I am speaking of re- 
sults fairly describable as new and sig- 
nificant, and applicable to the understand- 
ing of the normal human mind and the 
rational guidance of high-school and col- 
lege education. What for these purposes 
have all the Ebbinghauses to tell us of 
memory, association, judgment, and the 
relation of language to thought, that was 
not known to Mill, Taine, Schopenhauer, 
and Emerson, or for that matter to 
Quintilian, Cicero, and Plato? The at- 
tentive reader will find that at the critical 
moment they evade this test with de- 
nunciations of the insufficiency of Mill's 
association psychology, appeals to the 
blessed equivocation 'apperception,' and 
prophecies of greater things to come. 
[59] 



The Assault on Humanism 

Space fails for exhaustive citation, 
and it is difficult to single out individual 
names, not because fair quotation is 
offensive personality, but because there 
is no agreement about the scientific 
standing of many of these writers. When 
I say that Professor Miinsterberg's page 
about the contribution of experimental 
psychology to the philology of the epic, 
or his account of the experiments on the 
aesthetic appreciation of the Vowel-music 
of Keats and Byron, is pure, definite, and 
highly finished nonsense, I am some- 
times told that Professor Miinsterberg 
was not authorized to speak for psycholog- 
ical science. And there are doubtless 
iconoclasts who would oppose the same 
demurrer to a citation of typical utter- 
ances of President Stanley Hall or Mr. 
Flexner himself. 

Let us turn then to the widely com- 
mended and compulsorily studied huge 
volume of Professor Thorndike on edu- 
cational psychology. He begins by laying 
[60] 



The Assault on Humanism 

down in such a solemn way a long list of 
propositions such as these: 'When any 
conductive unit is in readiness to conduct, 
for it to do so is satisfying; when any 
conductive unit is not in readiness to 
conduct, for it to conduct is annoying.' — 
'A man's intellect and will is the sum of 
his tendencies to respond to situations 
and elements of situations.' 

The secondarily automatic reiteration 
of this sort of thing appeals to the eternal 
instinct for scholasticism in the human 
mind. In the words of James Russell 
Lowell, it 'cheaply gratifies that universal 
desire of the human mind to have every- 
thing accounted for.' It was this remark 
of Lowell's, perhaps, that led an adept 
of the new science of criticism to animad- 
vert more in sorrow than in anger on 
Lowell's unaccountable weakness for 
'stopping short of the ultimate.' When 
Professor Thorndike has posited his abso- 
lute and ultimate principles of education 
and descends to particulars, what has 

[61] 



The Assault on Humanism 

he to tell us? Well, he tells us among 
other things that educational theorists 
Violate these principles when they explain 
learning in terms of general faculties such 
as attention, interest, memory, or judg- 
ment, instead of, ' and so forth. 

It would require a chapter to expose 
the fallacies of that sentence. We have 
already seen that the eternal metaphysical 
antinomy of the one and the many, as 
transferred from ontology to psychology, 
is totally irrelevant to any profitable or 
practicable present-day discussion of the 
process of learning. One of the best 
modern psychologies for teachers, the 
little volume of the eminent English 
psychologist Lloyd-Morgan, dismisses in 
a brief paragraph the central nervous 
system, 'the multitude of connections' and 
all their afferents and efferents, and goes 
on to speak of the faculties of attention, 
memory, and so forth, as unaffectedly as 
you or I would do. Like Lowell, he has 

[62] 



The Assault on Humanism 

enough common sense to stop short of 
purely hypothetical ultimates. 

Particularizing still further, Professor 
Thorndike continues: 'School practice 
neglects them [these principles] . . . 
when it gives elaborate drills in bonus-a-um 
and in conjugating amo.' As soon as he 
says anything specific, he betrays himself. 
The statement is neither scientific nor 
true. There is no psychological prin- 
ciple that determines unconditionally 
the proportion of systematic formal mem- 
orizing of paradigms that is most helpful 
in the acquisition of an inflected language. 
It probably varies with the idiosyncrasy 
of different minds. Mere memorizing 
en bloc will not avail unless reinforced by 
exercises in the recognition and the use 
of the separate forms in phrases and 
sentences. And there is no salvation in 
educational psychology for a teacher too 
stupid to perceive or too lazy to practice 
this. But the majority of those who 
have really learned Latin have always 
[63] 



The Assault on Humanism 

memorized the forms. The majority of 
experienced teachers, from Quintilian 
down, have always believed that this is in 
the main the best way. Professor Thorn- 
dike's confident assertion, then, is not 
science: it is like Mr. Flexner's heavy 
satire on the procedure of the Latin class- 
room, and his assumption that nothing 
said or done there is made intelligible to 
the student — a mere ebullition of partisan 
rancor against the study of Latin. 

But I cannot summarize the entire litera- 
ture of this new scholasticism. It con- 
tains much else, of course: some sensible 
unsystematic observations of experienced 
teachers ; some contributions, it may be, to 
physiological psychology ; incongruous 
odds and ends of what I know to be mis- 
information drawn from the history of 
philosophy, and of what in my ignorance 
I will charitably assume to be information 
taken from textbooks of biology and 
anatomy; tabulations of answers to ques- 
tionnaires; the curves of progress in 
[64] 



The Assault on Humanism 

learning to telegraph or typewrite; the 
statistics of epilepsy, measurements of the 
force of the knee-jerk, and exercises in 
self-control — of the muscles that move 
the ears. 

An adult who has reference standards of 
real knowledge in his specialty, and is 
ballasted by the accumulated common 
sense of years of reading and experience, 
may dabble in this literature with no 
greater injury than loss of his time. Its 
disintegrating and deliquating effect on 
the logical functions of young minds com- 
pelled to attack it without the protection 
of a gasmask is a thing imagination bog- 
gles at. It will surely strain 'appercep- 
tion' to the limit to assimilate the state- 
ments within a few pages, that 'Socrates 
discovered concepts,' that 'the formula 
of cholestrin is C26H44OH2O4,' and that 
'Key declares that intense mental activity 
among the upper classes of Sweden has 
resulted in a marked increase in the 
tendency to nose-bleed.' 
5 [65] 



V 

The latest response to these challenges 
is a disclaimer of all pretensions to finality. 
What the pedagogical psychologists pro- 
fess for themselves and commend to us is 
the scientific and experimental attitude 
toward education as toward all large social 
and human interests. They are merely 
collecting statistics and trying experi- 
ments, to prove which of two competing 
methods of teaching is preferable. This 
position is in the abstract unassailable. 
But the inferences which the public is 
expected to draw from its application in 
practice are matters of grave concern. 

'There is danger,' says the Platonic 
Socrates, 'that you may be trying an 
experiment, not on the vile corpus of a 
Carian slave, but on your own sons or 
the sons of your friends, and, as the prov- 
erb says, breaking the large vessel in 
learning to make pots.' 

America is very large. It is that 

[66] 



The Assault on Humanism 

mart or world's fair of institutions and 
types which Plato says a great democ- 
racy must be. We could cordially wel- 
come the human experience which Mr. 
Flexner proposes to contribute to the 
exhibits, were it not for the misappre- 
hensions to which his designation of it 
as an experiment will give rise. This 
is not a verbal cavil. The modernist 
school will not be an experiment but an 
experience, standing in the same relation 
to all possible future sciences of character 
and education as that occupied by what 
Mill calls 'the general remarks afforded 
by common experience respecting human 
nature in our own age and by history 
respecting times gone by.' It will be one 
more increment of fact or group of facts. 
To call it an experiment in any scientific 
sense of the word is to mislead public 
opinion and prejudge the entire question. 
This popular exploitation of the false 
analogy between experiments in the lab- 
oratory and experiments on man and 
[67] 



The Assault on Humanism 

society is not a new thing. There is a 
clarifying literature of the subject which 
the modernists characteristically disre- 
gard. One source of this literature is the 
discussion by Brunetiere, Faguet, Doumic, 
and other thoughtful French critics, of 
Zola's naive notion of the experimental 
novel. The more technical examination 
of the idea derives from John Stuart Mill's 
chapters on the logic of the moral sciences. 
In the physical sciences the experimental 
method isolates and discovers the true 
cause by systematic elimination. The 
plurality of causes and the intermixture of 
effects preclude this procedure in the 
infinitely complex social sciences of ethnol- 
ogy and education. 'The instances requi- 
site for the prosecution of a directly 
experimental inquiry into the formation 
of character would be a number of human 
beings to bring up and educate from 
infancy to mature age. . . . It is not only 
impossible to do this completely, but even 
to do so much of it as should constitute a 

[68] 



The Assault on Humanism 

tolerable approximation. An apparently 
trivial circumstance which eluded our 
vigilance might let in a train of impres- 
sions and associations sufficient to vitiate 
the experiment. . . . No one who has 
sufficiently reflected on education is igno- 
rant of this truth.' 

Mr. Flexner's disciples owed it to them- 
selves and to the public to point out 
what they deemed the errors and limita- 
tions of Mill's doctrines here. Instead, 
they are content to applaud in general 
terms the advent of the experimental 
ideal in education. 

Professor Dewey welcomes the 'en- 
deavor to incarnate an experimental atti- 
tude in the conduct of a school, because 
it will substitute specific inquiries for 
temperamental conviction and small facts 
for opinions.' Here, as in the intro- 
ductory essay of Creative Intelligence, 
his deprecation of vagueness is couched 
in language singularly abstract and vague. 
There is no reference to any specific argu- 
[69] 



The Assault on Humanism 

ment or fact, experiment, or formulation 
of the experimental method on which 
issue might be joined. The New Republic 
itself is equally confident that 'no one 
who knows the temper of men like Mr. 
Flexner will for an instant question the 
utter disinterestedness, the exact and 
catholic spirit with which they will make 
the experiment.' 

Mr. Flexner, in advance of his experi- 
ment, holds conviction about the psy- 
chology of mental discipline and the 
teachers who 'treat with convincing 
gravity . . . things called voices, moods, 
and gerunds,' which are nothing if not 
temperamental. And the intellectual 
disinterestedness of an experimenter who 
proposes to test Latin by suppressing 
it altogether, inspires as little confidence 
as his logic. The fallacy of one cause 
dominates his thinking. He conceives 
experiment as the direct transfer of the 
method of Pasteur to society and educa- 
tion. Latin is a microbe by whose pres- 
[70] 



The Assault on Humanism 

ence or absence in a crucial instance the 
cause of disease or health may be ascer- 
tained. 

Life and education are infinitely com- 
plex. Those of us who most deplore Mr. 
Flexner's theories may also cordially wel- 
come the new school as a concrete entity. 
Any school that secures wholesome phys- 
ical and moral conditions for the early 
years of a select group of children may 
accomplish for them a good that outweighs 
the probable consequences of the intel- 
lectual errors of its founders. We wish 
the new school all success, and we believe 
in the entire sincerity of Mr. Flexner's 
enthusiasm for the betterment of Ameri- 
can education. But it would be the 
height of naivete to join in the congratula- 
tions on the presumable scientific dis- 
interestedness with which he will conduct 
the experiment. To do that is to overlook 
elementary human motive and the very 
nature of the problem. A school founded 
in large part to verify the assumption that 
[71] 



The Assault on Humanism 

Latin is neither a necessary nor a signif- 
icant ingredient in a well-mixed course 
of study is not likely to disappoint ex- 
pectation. And in the plurality of causes 
there is no scientific method by which the 
advocates of Latin will be able to disprove 
this foregone conclusion. This we foresee 
because, in spite of their perfunctory 
protests and caveats, the writings of the 
modernists plainly manifest an unreason- 
ing and violent antipathy, not merely to 
the study of Latin, but to the Classics 
and all that the Classics represent. 



[72] 



VI 
I have left myself only a few words to 
sum up and define the main issue raised 
by the so-called modernist reform of 
education. It is not the place of phys- 
ical science in our civilization and in 
our universities: that is secure. It is 
not the opportunity of industrial or 
vocational training for the masses: we 
all welcome that. It is not the conver- 
sion of the American high school into 
the old Latin-verse-writing English public 
school: nobody ever proposed that. It 
is not the prescription of a universal 
requirement of Greek or the maintenance 
of a disproportionate predominance of 
Latin in our high schools and colleges: 
there is not the slightest danger of that. 
It is the survival or the total suppression, 
in the comparatively small class of edu- 
cated leaders who graduate from high 
schools and colleges, of the very concep- 
tion of linguistic, literary, and critical 

[73] 



The Assault on Humanism 

discipline ; of culture, taste, and standards; 
of the historic sense itself ; of some trained 
faculty of appreciation and enjoyment of 
our rich heritage from the civilized past; 
of some counterbalancing familiarity with 
the actual evolution of the human man, 
to soften the rigidities of physical science, 
and to check and control by the touch- 
stones of humor and common sense the 
a priori deductions of pseudo-science from 
conjectural reconstructions of the evolu- 
tion of the physical and animal man. 

It is in vain that they rejoin that they 
too care for these things, and merely 
repudiate our exclusive definitions of 
them. That is, in the main, only oratori- 
cal precaution and the tactics of debate, 
as, if space permitted, I could show by 
hundreds of citations from their books. 
The things which, for lack of better names, 
we try to suggest by culture, discipline, 
taste, standards, criticism, and the his- 
toric sense, they hate. Or, if you prefer, 
they are completely insensitive to them 
[74] 



The Assault on Humanism 

and wish to impose their own insensibility 
upon the coming generation. They are 
genuinely skeptical of intellectual dis- 
criminations which they do not perceive, 
and aesthetic values which they do not 
feel. They are fiercely resentful of what 
they deem the supercilious arrogance of 
those who possess or strive for some far- 
off touch or faint tincture of the culture 
and discipline which they denounce as 
shibboleths, taboos, and the arbitrary 
conventions of pedants. 

From their own point of view it is 
natural that they should deprecate with 
sullen jealousy the inoculation of the 
adolescent mind with standards and 
tastes that would render it immune to 
what one of them has commended in 
print as the 'science' of Mrs. Elsie Clews 
Parsons. The purpose, or, at any rate, 
the tendency of their policies is to stamp 
out and eradicate these things and incul- 
cate exclusively their own tastes and 
ideals by controlling American education 
[75] 



The Assault on Humanism 

with the political efficiency of Prussian 
autocracy and in the fanatical intolerance 
of the French anticlericalists. Greek and 
Latin have become mere symbols and pre- 
texts. They are as contemptuous of Dante, 
Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, Burke, John 
Stuart Mill, Tennyson, Alexander Hamil- 
ton, or Lowell, as of Homer, Sophocles, 
Virgil, or Horace. They will wipe the slate 
of everything that antedates Darwin's De- 
scent of Man, Mr. Wells's Research Mag- 
nificent and the familiar pathos of James 
Whitcomb Riley's vernacular verse. 

These are the policies that mask as 
compassion for the child bored by lit- 
erature which, they say, it cannot be 
expected to appreciate and understand, 
or behind the postulate that we should 
develop aesthetic and literary sensibilities 
only by means of the literature that 
expresses the spirit of modern science, 
not that which preserves in amber the 
husks of the dead past. 

'Purpose' is, after 'situation,' the fav- 
[76] 



The Assault- on Humanism 

orite catchword of this propaganda. 
Truly — they will 'answer to the purpose 
easy things to understand.' Easy things 
to understand, — the things of immediate 
appeal to the relaxed self and the natural 
taste for bathos, — these only would they 
stamp upon the plastic memory of child- 
hood. They do not wish the child's mind, 
even in the strenuous morning hours of 
school, to be tuned to the pitch, to be 
keyed up to the appreciation of the 
things that are more excellent — the things 
that even in imperfect apprehension may 
abide in the memory as possessions, 
touchstones, standards, ideals for life. 

Much lost I; something stayed behind. 
A snatch maybe of classic song, 
Some breathing of a deathless mind, 
Some love of truth, some hate of wrong. 

'The literature that embodies the sci- 
entific and progressive thought of the 
present age.' On this only would they 
form the collegian's taste and judgment, 
and his sense of historical, social, and 
human values. They do not wish the 
[77] 



The Assault on Humanism 

undergraduate's automatic response to 
the stimulus and the all-absorbing fashion 
of the contemporary environment to be 
confused by comparisons with fashions 
of thought that have passed away. They 
instinctively distrust that spirit of critical 
humanism which, from Plato to Pater and 
Arnold and Lowell and Anatole France, has 
always refused to take quite seriously the 
systems and the system-builders of the hour. 
These half-conscious motives are clothed 
with the glow of conscious sincerity by 
their genuine incapacity to conceive that 
writers who never heard of submarines and 
Zeppelins can contribute anything to the 
spiritual and intellectual life of a civiliza- 
tion that culminates in the War of 19 14. 
Homer was a primitive tribal bard. 
^Eschylus represents the obsolete soci- 
ology of the city state. The cosmic 
philosophy of Herbert Spencer has only 
contempt for the petty personal theme 
of the imperialistic and militaristic Virgil 
— 'Arms and the man.' What message 
[78] 



The Assault on Humanism 

can he, the singer of imperial Rome, have 
for the modern spirit: — 

Now his Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple 
Caesar's dome. 

The theology of Dante and Milton 
lacks the breadth of the Lincoln social 
settlement and the congress of religions 
— and their cosmogony is incompatible 
with the planetesimal theory. 

Shakespeare is feudal; Pope, Queen- 
Anneish; Burke, eighteenth-century; 
Tennyson and Mill, Victorian. Neither 
irony, nor rhetoric, nor argument will 
make any dent in the carapace of minds 
case-hardened in the formulas of an a 
priori evolutionary philosophy of progress 
against all direct, immediate, and per- 
emptory perception of absolute beauties 
and finer shades of truth. The certainties 
of their fixed and fanatical assurance are 
unclouded by any such self-questioning 
as that which gives pause to the great 
liberal, radical, and modernist poet Car- 
ducci, in his wonderful sonnet to Dante, 
[791 



The Assault on Humanism 

which I give here in Richard Garnett's 
translation : 

Dante, how is it that my vows I bear, 
Submitted at thy shrine to bend and pray, 
To Night alone relinquishing thy lay, 
And with returning sun returning there? 
Never for me hath Lucy breathed a prayer, 
Matilde with lustral fount washed sin away, 
Or Beatrice on celestial way 
Led up her mortal love by starry stair. 
Thy Holy Empire I abhor, the head 
Of thy great Frederick, in Olona's vale 
Most joyfully had cloven, crown and brains. 
Empire and Church in crumbling ruin fail: 
Above, thy ringing song from heaven is sped: 
The Gods depart, the poet's hymn remains. 

'Our little systems have their day,' 
said another obsolete nineteenth-century 
poet and thinker. Our little systems 
have their day; but the human spirit that 
creates and dissolves all systems, abides. 
And the study of the human spirit is not 
planetary or biological evolution, or the 
anthropology of the pre-human man. It 
is neither the psychology of the laboratory 
nor the metaphysics of the schools: it is 
neither science nor pseudo-science — it is 
humanism. 

[80] 



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